GANDHI'S PASSION: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF MAHATMA GANDHIBYSTANLEY WOLPERTOUPPAGES: 291; RS. $27.50

FOR Indias midnight childrenthose born in a freshly partitioned and free
HindustanGandhi and Nehru represented the two facets of adolescent, post-colonial
pride. The tension between the Mahatmas anarchic vision of a self-sufficient village
India and the armature of a sovereign state that a hard-hatted Nehru was fabricating
feverishly at Tarapore and Khadakvasla, Sindri and Bhakra Nangal, was not always clear to
us. For us primary-schoolers of the 50s, it was the Sabarmati sant who
in the words of the famous Jagriti film song had miraculously given us freedom sans
shield-and-sword.

We knew that the young Gandhi had refused to cheat at school, even when his teacher had
nudged-and-winked so as to present the visiting inspector with a class of word-perfect
spellers. We could almost hear the goat which kid Mohandas had consumed with a friend
bleating normatively inside young Gandhi. We awaited with solemn, juvenile eagerness the
two-minute break from all scholarly activity at 11 am on Martyrs DayJanuary
30when Gandhi was gunned down at the eponymously rechristened Tees Janvari Marg in
Lutyens Delhi. As Stanley Wolperts empathetic and meticulous biography makes
clear, the assassins bullet found its mark that day in 1948 just after five in the
evening: Mahatma Gandhis passionate heart poured its crimson blood out onto
his white shawl. His gentle body collapsed and stopped breathing at 5.17 pm.

But national commemoration of the Father of the Nation rightly required that we
remembered the Great Man outside the restrictive space of families huddled over an evening
cup of tea. So even if mildly anachronistic, individual Indians stood up in non-familial
groups, wherever they wereat offices, schools, colleges, factories at 11 amin
silent tribute to Mahatma Gandhi. In our youthful, febrile imagination we debated
inconclusively whether trains screeched to a regulation two-minute halt an hour before
noon. We were unaware of the travails and triumphs of Indias most famous third-class
passenger, who since his first such rail journey from the Calcutta Congress to Rajkot in
1901 was to hitch his career as a nationalist to this novel and plebeian carriage.

But those days, to bend the language a bit, is past now. No such commemoration seems to
take place in schools these days. What is Martyrs Day? is a general
knowledge question 11-year-olds have to get right in a school test; they dont live
those two Gandhian minutes every year any longer. One wonders whether the average aspiring
karorpati on the Star TV show would get it right first shot, without phoning a friend or
going 50-50!

Gandhis Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma, though written for the
world at large, is timely for us living in the India of today. Wolperts attempt is
to demonstrate through a close reading of Gandhis own voluminous writings the unique
combination of yogic tapas and Christian passionthe suffering of Jesus Christ
on the crossthat the Mahatma embodied in his body-polity. The notion of
sacrifice is of course central to all mass nationalist leaders, for if nationalism is the
successful inculcation of a unifying sentiment in a diverse populace, the difference
between the leaders and the mass can be made bridgeable by the practice of tyag, and not tapas
alone.

Wolpert takes us through the trials and tribulations of Gandhis life with a
surefootedness that is often lacking in other scholarly exercises. His story of the life
of this supreme votary of non-violence repeatedly reminds us of the tremendous physical
violence that Gandhi had to endure in his political career. In South Africa an enraged
Pathan who thought Gandhi had sold out to General Smuts nearly broke his ribs; in 1934
when he had taken on the cause of untouchability, bombs were hurled at what his high caste
assailants in Poona thought was the car carrying Gandhi, and in the run-up to the
Partition, which he could oppose only ineffectively, he was repeatedly attacked and
verbally abused in Calcutta and Delhi.

There is of course a fair amount here on Gandhis obsession with bodily functions
and his demonstrative brahmacharya, but equally important for this study of Gandhis
passion is an account of sheer bodily pain that Gandhi endured and inflicted upon himself.
Were Gandhi not such a masterful, modern mass leader, one would be tempted to give the nod
to the lazy generalisation that much like the yogis and sufis of yore, Gandhi practised
austerities in order to induce states outside the realm of normal experience. But whatever
the exact locus of his small inner voice, to which Wolpert draws repeated
attention, Mahatma Gandhi was a nationalist, and given the modernity of that category
could never have been a living god to the millions of his peasant followers.

This point needs some emphasis, for when Wolpert writes of the illiterate millions,
who (in 1921) fought to bow and touch his bare feet or his naked legs, and worshipped the
Mahatma as their living god, walking all day and night for a glimpse of his bald
head, he overdramatises. And for two reasons. First, Mahatma Gandhi was never
deified in the proper sense of that term. Popular adoration of Gandhi, the mad quest for
his darshan produced for sure a category of active peasant followers who acted upon their
own understanding of his message, often in starkly un-Gandhian ways. It never created a
sect of Gandhipanthis, as happened with a Kabir or other medieval saints. And that was
because Gandhi was a nationalist leader, and nationalism leads to
citizenshiphowsoever circumscribed for somein a nation-state, not to a
membership in a sampradaya or a silsilah.

The obverse of this nationalist deification of Gandhi was the
commodification of his name and of his image. Gandhi was incensed by a packet of
cigarettes bearing his impress that were being marketed by an Indian manufacturer in
Gorakhpur in eastern UP and in distant Assam. He perhaps did not notice that one Dev Das
& Co. of Benares had made a Mahatma Gandhi rubber-stamp in mid-1921 at the height of
the non-cooperation movement, pricing it at a high Rs 3.50. Advertised as ideal for
patriots, and for panchayats, courts and for sewa samitis, it was often purchased by
a District Congress Committee, which alone could afford it, to convert an ordinary
register into a Nationalist Register. The Register of Volunteers, Gorakhpur Congress
Committee of early 1922, which included the names of some of the peasant nationalists who
were to turn violent at Chauri Chaura on February 4, had been rubber-stamped by such a
Mahatma Gandhi.

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